Mark and I had a good day yesterday. We got bills paid in the morning--gosh, I am so grateful for a good job with steady income--and then we went out to work in the yard. It was a beautiful afternoon, with a blue sky but still cool enough to be able to work hard without overheating.
We finally got the last of the pile of maple branches cleaned up. In a perfect world, we would have trimmed them all into kindling and firewood, but the reality is, that we just don't have time. We loaded them into Little Red for a trip to the dump. Before we made the dump run, we put all the lawn furniture away for the winter, gave the yard it's last (I hope) autumn mowing, and pulled up the last of the tomatillo and cucumber plants out in the garden--I had already pulled the tomato and bean plants two or three weeks ago.
My back is a little achy this morning, but it's a good ache, from good work well done with my sweetheart and best friend. I know you know that feeling! My pedometer had over 12,000 steps on it yesterday! It was a busy day.
Today: church, choir practice, and then I'll go over to Sheila Zachry's house to work on some plans she and I are hatching for the English dept - trying to move folks forward on actually teaching writing instead of just assigning it. A shift in thinking for some of the colleagues - not that they're being bad teachers, but just that none of us, including Sheila and me, were trained in how to actually teach writing. We became English teachers because we love literature, and we're all pretty good, more or less, at writing, but we do it as a natural skill, not something we've had to pay attention to how to teach and learn the finer points. I'm on my 15th year of teaching now, and I only just learned how to really teach comma usage, so that kids could learn and apply it, 4 or 5 years ago. And even though I've shared the technique with my department a number of times, it's taken until this fall for the entire department to agree to adopt the strategy. Sometimes the work is a slow go!
Happy/Sad: Here's a photo of little Garrett with his mommy, Ellen (Carlson) Goldsborough. The photo was taken about two weeks before he died. Such a beautiful, happy little guy. Such a sad, sad loss.
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